Office parties can be awkward affairs but, on a sunny Monday in early June, a celebration at Random House’s Midtown headquarters had a genuine frisson of joy.
The guest of honor was Chris Whitaker, 43, a beaming, raven-haired Brit, whose fourth novel, “All the Colors of the Dark,” had just sold its millionth copy. His editor and publicists were drinking champagne and digging into a sheet cake topped with the cover of the book. Down the hall, a jumbo version of the purple-hued jacket hung beside Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land.”
Whitaker has been promoting “All the Colors of the Dark” since last June, spending at least one week a month touring. His efforts have paid off: The book, which comes out in paperback on July 1, spent 22 weeks on the best-seller list, was published in 30 countries and is being adapted for television.
Readers have responded rapturously, including Jenna Bush Hager, who compared the 608-page yarn to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Goldfinch” and “Room,” when announcing it as a Read With Jenna book club pick.
In an interview, she recalled devouring it in two days on her mother-in-law’s porch, planted in a vinyl chair that left stripes on the back of her legs. “My husband was like, ‘Mom just needs to finish this book and then she’ll be present.’ “
“All the Colors of the Dark” begins in 1975 in Monta Clare, Mo., when two teens, Patch and Grace, fall in love in the pitch black basement where they’re being held by their kidnapper.
“I liked the idea that they’d never seen each other,” Whitaker said, “just two people getting to know each other when everything else was stripped away.”
That idea — and the impetus behind Whitaker’s writing career — grew out of an encounter in another dark place: His childhood bedroom in Southgate, North London.
Whitaker’s parents divorced when he was 5. When he was 10, his mother entered a relationship with a man who took an instant dislike to him.
“I remember the word brat being used repeatedly,” Whitaker said, “But I wasn’t a brat. I was quiet and bookish.”
One night, his mother’s boyfriend appeared at his bedside, reeking of alcohol. “I was fast asleep,” he said, “and then wide-awake and all of a sudden hearing the bone break in my wrist from his hand. He was very adamant: Keep your mouth shut and stop crying. You can’t make any noise.”
Whitaker recounted this calmly, as if describing a tussle with a garden variety bully. Ditto a later episode involving a lit cigarette pressed to his thigh. But when asked how he made it through the long hours until morning, Whitaker’s face slackened.
“I put my arm on a pillow and my back against the headboard and remained in a still position,” he said. Per the boyfriend’s instructions, he told his mother he’d broken his wrist playing soccer.
Soon after, Whitaker started skipping school. By 15, he’d discovered alcohol and drugs. By 18, he’d failed an exam required to get into university. He worked at a supermarket bakery and in bars, sold electrical cabling and eventually became a real estate agent.
One morning in 2000, Whitaker was distributing leaflets in North London when he was approached by a man who demanded to use his phone. “I remember knowing I was going to get mugged,” he said, “so I punched the guy in the face.”
The brawl escalated. Even after he’d been stabbed multiple times with a carving knife, Whitaker refused to hand over his phone. Recounting the blade stuck clear through to his back. he stayed surprisingly cheerful. But his message was solemn.
“I didn’t like feeling like a victim,” he said, “so that’s what made me fight back.” If not for these acts of violence, he believes he wouldn’t be a novelist today.
He’d always been a reader, a fan of Stephen King, John Grisham and Tess Gerritsen. But, in the aftermath of the attack (which he didn’t report to the police), Whitaker turned to the self help section of the library. There he found a book — he can’t remember the title — which prescribed writing as an antidote to PTSD.
“You write down what happened,” Whitaker said, “but you change the people involved to fictional characters. You change the outcome to something you control. And you change the location to the last place you were happy.”
The first night he tried this technique, Whitaker slept well for the first time in almost a decade. He kept going, responding to prompts like, “Show yourself in a braver light.” He stuck with the program for about a year.
“I felt better,” Whitaker said, “but, as with all therapy, I never know if it’s the time as much as what you’re doing. The skeptic in me thinks, do anything for three years and you’re three years down the line from the trauma.”
Whitaker became a stockbroker, got married, quit his job and started writing his first novel, “Tall Oaks.” Then he wrote another, “All the Wicked Girls.” The books were critical successes but didn’t sell many copies. By the time he embarked on a third, he had two children and a job at Bishop’s Stortford Library in Hertfordshire. Money was tight.
“My dad told me, ‘This is a hobby. You can’t survive like this. You need to grow up,’” Whitaker said.
He kept at it, revisiting an old computer file from his writing-as-therapy days. That file became “We Begin at the End” (2021), which a New York Times reviewer described as “part thriller, part bildungsroman, part Dickensian tear-jerker and — most startlingly — part western.”
Whitaker conducted virtual book events from a build-it-yourself shed that doubled as an office in his London backyard. His house was under construction when the pandemic descended, so he and his family, including a newborn, muddled through part of lockdown without a roof. It was an inauspicious way to launch a novel, but “We Begin at the End” landed on the best-seller list for five weeks.
Whitaker was a year into “All the Colors of the Dark” before he realized why it was so difficult for him to write about kids in captivity who were deprived of light for 300 days.
“I began to piece together how my life had shaped up to get to this point,” Whitaker said. “I wanted to answer the question, for myself as much as the characters: If someone else dictates the beginning of your story, is it possible to write the end yourself?”
The novel’s time frame unspools over 27 years, across numerous American cities and states while Patch, the protagonist, searches for his lost, possibly nonexistent, love.
Whitaker’s father had taken him to Disney World when he was 9 so, he said, “America became the happy place for my writing.” He worked across three screens: One displaying his manuscript; another, pictures of locations he was writing about (all places he’d never been); and, finally, a third including everything a character could feel and hear. ”
Whitaker’s editor, Amy Einhorn said, “A sentence I might whip over, he spent a month researching.” But the real secret to Whitaker’s appeal, she believes, is his ability to braid several genres — thriller, romance, domestic drama and mystery. In “All the Colors of the Dark,” for instance, there are “multiple love stories, but there’s also a serial killer,” Einhorn said. “He’s managed to put all these things together that seem like they wouldn’t work.”
Whitaker is now gearing up for a round of events for the paperback. In the course of his travels for the hardcover, he has already spoken of his own trauma approximately 200 times — enough to remove some of the sting, but not so much that details remain at bay. For instance, he recently spotted a pattern on a car seat that reminded him of the blood in his own vehicle after being stabbed.
“It’s funny how the brain works,” Whitaker said.
He’s checked in with his therapist occasionally while touring. And he’s earned something important from strangers who’ve share their own stories of trauma along the way. “Speak out,” Whitaker said. “If I had told my mum or dad earlier, I might have spared myself. Who knows where I would have ended up?”
As for the question of writing his own ending, Whitaker was sanguine.
“Patch goes into the dark one person and comes out someone else,” he said. “Like me, Patch didn’t have a perfect childhood, but he was looked after. He was loved. And then this terrible thing happened and he came out of the dark with purpose. That’s what happened to me.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
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